Toxic Agriculture and the Gates Foundation

Colin Todhunter

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) – a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition and ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development. The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?’ According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is based on deepening the role of multinational companies in the Global South.

On release of the report, Polly Jones, the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, said:

The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed.”

She added that this concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of ‘corporate America’:

The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”

The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlines the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.

Curtis describes how the foundation is working with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.

According to Curtis, the Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent.

The Gates Foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer. It is effectively promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops.

What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. Curtis says AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.

More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Bill Gates and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.

Gates, pesticides and global health

The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals. This is something that has not been lost on environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason.

Mason notes that the Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. She adds that the Gates Foundation is also reported to be collaborating in Bayer’s promotion of “new chemical approaches” and “biological crop protection” (i.e. encouraging agrochemical sales and GM crops) in the Global South.

After having read the recent ‘A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission’, Mason noticed that pesticides were conspicuous by their absence and therefore decided to write to Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who is the lead author of the report.

But perhaps this should come as little surprise: some 42 authors names are attached to the report and Mason says that in one way or another via the organisations they belong to, many (if not most) have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Gates has been the largest or second-largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years. His foundation provided 11% of the WHO’s entire budget in 2015, which is 14 times greater than the UK government’s contribution.

Perhaps this sheds some light onto why a major report on child health would omit the effects of pesticides. Mason implies this is a serious omission given what the UN expert on toxics Baskut Tuncak said in a November 2017 article in the Guardian:

Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world’s most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU’s food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto, the pesticide’s manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.

Mason notes that in February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (GreenPeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture.

Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.

In his 2017 article, he stated:

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.

Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.

He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.

However, it seems that the profits of agrochemical manufacturers trump the rights of children and the public at large: a joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.

Mason refers to an analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ which revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.

This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall. This firm conducts detailed market research all over the world and sells databases and intelligence to pesticide companies. The data covers around 40% of the $57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018. It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.

While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, Mason outlines the spiraling rates of disease in the UK and the US and lays the blame at the door of the agrochemical corporations that Gates has opted to get into bed with. She focuses on the impact of glyphosate-based herbicides as well as the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.

Mason has discussed the health-related impacts of glyphosate in numerous previous reports and in her open letter to Costello again refers to peer-reviewed studies and official statistics which indicate that glyphosate affects the gut microbiome and is responsible for a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Moreover, she presents evidence that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.

However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’. Yet Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 42,700 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.

Mason says that each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, she argues, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remains conspicuously absent from the disease narrative.

She states that we are exposed to a lifetime’s exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals that contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested – “a global mass poisoning.”

Gates Foundation in perspective

As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.

However, Rosemary Mason alludes to the fact that the Gates Foundation seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals while promoting the interests of the firms that produce them, but it facilitates many health programmes that help boost the bottom line of drug companies.

Health and health programmes seem only to be defined with certain parameters which facilitate the selling of the products of the major pharmaceutical companies which the foundation partners with. Indeed, researcher Jacob Levich argues that the Gates Foundation not merely facilitates unethical low-cost clinical trials (with often devastating effects for participants) in the Global South but also assists in the creating new markets for the “dubious” products of pharmaceuticals corporations.

As for food security, the foundation would do better by supporting agroecological (agrochemical-free) approaches to agriculture, which various high-level UN reports have advocated for ensuring equitable global food security. But this would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agro-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations that the foundation supports – dispossession and market dependency.

And these aims have been part of a decades-long strategy where we have seen the strengthening of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

While Bill Gates is busy supporting the consolidation of Western agro-capital in Africa under the guise of ensuring ‘food security’, it is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70.

The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.

The Gates Foundation promotes a (heavily subsidised and inefficient – certainly when the externalised health, social and environment costs are factored in) corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on, among other things, unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which the Gates Foundation once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.

At the same time, the foundation is helping powerful corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge. For instance, since 2003, CGIAR (mentioned at the start of this article) and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation.

In a June 2016 article in The Asian Age, Vandana Shiva says the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Shiva adds that the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.

The foundation is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.

Shiva says that DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity and argues:

Today, biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. It is done by taking patents by ‘mapping’ genomes and genome sequences… DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks. It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’. It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.

She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek – their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.

This process is the very foundation of capitalism – appropriation of the commons (seeds, water, knowledge, land, etc.), which are then made artificially scarce and transformed into marketable commodities.

The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.

The Gates Foundation is part of the problem, not the solution. To more fully appreciate this, let us turn to a February 2020 article in the journal Globalizations.

Its author, Ashok Kumbamu, argues that the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies – whether GM seeds, agrochemicals or commodified knowledge – on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create dependency and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold.

To properly understand Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is not to take stated goals and objectives at face value but to regard his ideology as an attempt to manufacture consent and prevent and marginalise more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to capitalist interests.

The foundation’s activities must be located within the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism: displacement of the peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by the Western agri-food conglomerates whose interests the Gates Foundation facilitates and legitimizes.

Especially poignant considering the most probable source of Covid-19, like Ebola and many other recent virus outbreaks, is corporate agribusiness and it’s SOP of major land clearances for monocultural harvest exacerbated by major chemical use.
This destruction of natural ecosystems for modern development, not only eliminates natural controls on viruses, but also forces their animal carrying vectors to move to other locations for survival, spreading these viruses.

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kevin morris

Apr 26, 2020 3:56 PM

Bill Gates is a technocrat, and believes that science and technology offers the only solution to the world’s problems. He shares his heritage with much of today’s western world and of course with the Chinese Communist Party which increasingly pursues a similar, though some would say, a more draconian course.

It has long been clear that it isn’t the third world which is responsible for most of the ills of the world, but those who claim that only technology offers the solution to the world’s problems. We should not forget that Nazi Germany’s extreme eugenics policy involving the murder of the mentally ill was originally proposed by America eugenicists including Gate’s own antecedents.

There was a time when a strong non aligned group offered a real alternative to the technocratic nightmare. Sadly, those days seem to be over whilst the answers promoted by the likes of the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation appear increasingly malign.

Sadly, I see no evidence that the left offers a real alternative to what Gates and his pals are up to.

Speaking as a person of religion myself I tend to agree with you that from a personal viewpoint, the remedies you suggest are indeed the answer, but one cannot avoid the words of that arch cynic Frank Zappa, who in so many ways sums up the age old diemma- ‘and the meek shall inherit nothing’.

Sometimes it is difficult reconciling personal ethics and the activities of the wider world.

I tend to believe that the meek have already inherited it- that is the people who are able to see the world in its primordial purity rather than focusing on the corruption that the rest of us tend to focus upon.

Yes, in the world but not of it. I find that difficult to maintain constantly. To survive, the pressures of modern life have to be attended to for a lot of the time but I find that regularly slipping out into a different state of conciousness is good for my sanity. Through the eyes of a child so to speak.

The difficulty for those who take Frank’s position uncompromisingly is that the world is by and large a reflection of our own internal state. As philosophers of old stated, ‘ as within, so without’. Hence, those who speak of truth or reality beg a very important question, which truth, which reality?

Generally I agree with you on all counts. although everybody who knew Frank testified to the fact that he was a very kindhearted guy who had a compassionate outlook. It’s a real shame that Frank’s family is now seriously divided

For the conspiracy theorists out there, there is a possibility that his serious intention of standing for the US presidency with the encouragement of Vaclav Havel, might have led to his early demise. The older I get I tend to dismiss most, but as the great Fats Waller often said, ‘One never knows, do one?’

Gates exists to promote globalist corporate interests under the guise of charity and humanitarianism. GMO, agribusiness, big pharma, privatised healthcare and services, export led agriculture, all serving the interests of the 0.1%.

In Kenya, 100,000 people work in producing fresh flowers for western markets.
All well and good till air transport is closed down and nobody is buying flowers for weddings.

Hello BFBF: It’s very strange that most civilians come down on capitalism, but fail to identify the problem as corporatism. Corporatism and associated medusas hold the keys to all economic rationing and control of functional resources.

Learning about the robber barons and the trust busters used to be standard history lessons. Maybe because we grew up with gangster movies about prohibition; maybe because in so many towns you’d hear the names Peabody, Carnegie and you learned about JP. Morgan and his cohort.
I suppose like so much of real life it has been consigned to the dustbin and replaced with postcrapulism.

It appears, the Gates Foundation hasn’t only been busy starving indigenous populations in Africa, but was fully engaged in paralyzing children in India.

“After promising $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.”

Here’s an informative excerpt from a 2007 LA Times article:
“The Gates Foundation has targeted AIDS, TB and malaria because of their devastating health and economic effects in sub-Saharan Africa. But a Times investigation found that programs the foundation funded, including those of the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance, which finances vaccines, have mixed influences on key measures of societal health:

* By pouring most contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea and asphyxia.

* The focus on a few diseases has shortchanged basic needs such as nutrition and transportation, undermining the effectiveness of the foundation’s grants. Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.

* Gates-funded vaccination programs have instructed caregivers to ignore — even discourage patients from discussing — ailments that the vaccinations cannot prevent. This is especially harmful in outposts where a visit to a clinic for a shot is the only contact some villagers have with healthcare providers for years.”

It should be mentioned, the annual global funding of the Gates Foundation goes directly to lobbying and advocacy, more than $100 million. Gates funds institutions ranging from US university departments to major international development NGOs. The Foundation is the main player in several global health partnerships and one of the single largest donors to the WHO. This gives it considerable leverage in shaping health policy priorities and intellectual norms. Perhaps, that’s why the WHO proclaimed COVID-19 to be a pandemic, a virus less deadly than the flu.

It’s my personal opinion, that the Gates Foundation Like the Rockefeller Foundation is a front organization. By that I mean, it’s an entity set up and controlled by the intelligence agencies who work hand-in-hand with multinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies with the objective of using indigenous populations to do wide scale “experimental tests” of chemicals and medicinal drugs. It’s irrelevant whether these tests cause mass death, in fact in might be viewed as an “off-label” benefit, inasmuch, as overpopulation is their overriding concern.

PROPHET OR DILETTANTE ?

That being said, last night on MSNBC Gates was shown a clip of children returning to school in Denmark. The commentator (I believe was a physician) asked Gates for his opinion with the reverence a disciple would display when awaiting a prophet’s inspiring revelation. What does this schmucky techy know about viruses, or for that matter anything other than cheating is Microsoft co-founder.

We should all be very alert to the activities of two specific entities excessively concerned with “all things” COVID-19, and those two organizations are the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Gates is eager to test new vaccines, but this time it’s not in Africa and Asia it’s in the US, his new disposables. And the Rockefeller Foundation is all-in on contact surveillance tracing. So this is how it works, if you survive the vaccine you’ll be track and traced.

HOW WILL YOU BE CATALOGED?

Oh by the way, did you hear the latest they have a brand new way to know whether you were injected with their latest and greatest creation–“skin record embedding.”

“Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.

Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.

The system—which has not yet been tested in children—would provide quick and easy access to vaccination history, avoid the risk of clerical errors, and add little to the cost or risk of the procedure.”

How about that–one stop shopping, a vaccine with an injectable barcode. Billions will now be properly cataloged by a coterie of psychotic sadists. Oh and don’t forget, their philanthropic donations are all tax deductible.

“It’s my personal opinion, that the Gates Foundation Like the Rockefeller Foundation is a front organization.”
A close reading of Bill Gates’ story raises so many red flags it is hard not to conclude that Microsoft itself is a front organization. A behemoth like IBM (with its Nazi-eugenics links) just doing a deal with an unknown nerd, who turns out to have eugenics links… Improbable tends to = unlikely.
The whole component/computing sector was driven by the Defense Department, which also set up Silicon Valley. Only after many decades did the sector develop a consumer products arm parallel to its defense contracting arm. Microsoft’s intel-friendly software, its attempt at phones parallel to Google (win-win), its purchase of Skype, Swift-key, LinkedIn… all mirror Google-In-Q-tel and Facebook-nee-LifeLog.

And IBM does a deal with an unknown nerd: to the nerd’s total, 100% benefit… given that… IBM already has the PC-OS idea in mind… plucks a guy from nowhere… donates to him the idea..and makes him the world’s richest man.
IBM = Inadvertent Bowel Movement… sure.

Conspiracy theories often come about because people don’t know the full story. Gates wasn’t ‘an unknown nerd’. His company already had a profile in personal computing with Microsoft Basic and he was not the only person who IBM was looking to for an operating system for their 8080 based personal computer. Probably the most sought after figure as far as IBM was concerned was Gary Kildall, the inventor of the CP/M operating system for Z80 8 bit computers. Since CP/M was a flexible operating system used in business computers and there was a massive library of software for it, Kildhall was the man IBM would have preferred. As I recall, on the day that Kildall was due to meet representatives from IBM, he was out flying his model aeroplane. That is the point when IBM turned to Gates who didn’t have a 16 bit operating system but went to Seattle Computer Store and bought theirs.

As for IBM already having ‘the PC-OS idea in mind’, yes indeed they did, but the whole personal computer thing was a strange move for IBM and one feels they were stung into doing it by the burgeoning home computer movement in the US and elsewhere, but wanted to do it as cheaply as possible. What you refer to as PC-OS was actually PC DOS, the OS sold to them by Gates, and which was virtually identical to MS DOS, the operating system that launched the mass market computing revolution, but silently marked the ultimate death knell for the IBM PC because others did it better and cheaper.

Bill Gates is certainly an asshole and was so right from the start. He was viewed with derision by the early computer nerds whose approach was far more egalitarian. There are several examples in print of Gates berating others for their non profit approach. He certainly is an unpleasant character but I’d simply view him as being at the right place at the right time and able to exploit his position to the maximum. That doesn’t make him some sort of pawn of dark forces courtesy of IBM. In fact it is clear that his approach harmed IBM greatly.

Ironically, whilst MS DOS and later Windows did win through, it fell first to Apple and then to the Linux revolution. There is no longer good reason to shell out the extra £100 on the price of a computer to have Windows since the Linux operating system and all the tools you’ll probably ever need, come downloadable and free of charge.

There is still much good in the world, none of which is served in any way by conspiracy theories that don’t actually hold much water.

DARPA and now there’s an IARPA
work hand-in-glove with some of the most hideous and predatory multinational corporations.
China just donated $30 million to the WHO. Puppet governments regularly sellout their own populations to be used as human Guinea pigs.

Worldwide gangsterism is what controls this planet. What is that tried and true expression: “Behind every great fortune there’s a great crime.”

PS Bayer/Farber was the Nazi chemical company that supplied the poison chemicals for the gas chambers. They used slaves from the concentration camps to help produce the products which would be used to eventually kill them. How efficient was that?

“The Kennedy assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one over-ridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom those others work.”
– L. Fletcher Prouty

As I got a very negative response to my last post, I am going to defend what I wrote, as my views remain unchanged.

I’m replying to everyone at once here as so many people disagreed with me including apparently (though one can never be too sure due to “trollism”) quite a few anonymous downvoters.

Either way I don’t care tuppence about personal dislike, but what’s important is to challenge the wrong ideas I believe people are holding, because our future literally does depend on them.

People got upset with me for 3 main reasons it appears:
a) I questioned – not the green agenda – but the realism of it – note the distinction, which is what I think is causing the problem as I’ll explain below.
b) I suggestion (much needed, as I’ll explain) population control
c) according to some I am even supposedly some kind of a “covert agent” come here to deceive everybody – I mean, just briefly on that one, such (in truth ridiculous) assertions suggest that people don’t have brains to think with, so clearly I must have some kind of unique “hypnotic power” that nobody else has got so everybody has got to be on their guard whatever I write because there’s some “Catcher in the Rye” phenomena going on here, it may even be the way I incorporate Masonic numbers into my writing without anybody noticing, and if you think about it for example, if you take 1 away from 7 billion (I mean, here is paranoia in action for you, as I only just thought of this myself) you get 6,999, 999, 999 and it you turn all those 999’s upside down you get 666 666 666, so clearly I am nearly the devil himself.

I mean, if anybody is crazy enough to believe the latter, obviously nothing I can say will persuade them I’m not “an illuminati plant”, but for those who are still able to think with their reason instead of their emotions I will proceed in self-defence.

First, will all concerned please get it through their heads “where I am coming from.”

I think the reason a lot of people have a problem with me, is because I am mainly basically an “old fashioned socialist”, but you see, old fashioned socialists were also largely nationalists – they were against the EU like Tony Benn, and Jeremy Corbyn originally was.

Keir Hardie – the founder of the Labour party – and this is around 100 years ago – complained that Scottish bosses were importing Eastern Europeans to undercut Scottish Labour, and 100 years later the bosses are still doing that in the entire UK and West generally, but they’ve managed to con even a lot of socialists into believing it’s racism to object to this.

e.g. take the standard claim that the NHS couldn’t survive without immigrant workers which now most of the Labour party including Jeremy Corbyn agree with.

In actual fact, there are about 3 million EU immigrants here, which is 5% of the population roughly and the number of EU immigrants in the NHS is also about 5%.

So in fact, if all EU immigrants (including the NHS workers) were returned to their native countries there would be exactly the same proportion of NHS staff to patients, but note well, a lot more additional spare hospital beds.

But sadly not only do the “socialists” (Blairite types in particular) not connect the fact when they go to the hospital or doctor or dentist, and find the queues and waiting lists longer and beds less available, with the fact we have 3.3 million roughly EU immigrants here (to say nothing of non EU immigration and illegal immigration), they also think it’s a really great idea to take “the best people” from all around the world, which means deprived places like Eastern Europe or Africa, including to care for our old people, without the slightest concern apparently that we thereby deprive all these countries of their best people, so they don’t have those doctors and nurses and younger people to care for their older people.

So instead of just downvoting me, please tell me how/why that is fair, for us to take away from poor countries all their best people – doctors, nurses, etc.; and no, don’t tell me it’s all OK because they send money home to their families, because that still doesn’t solve the problem of where their carers, doctors, nurses and dentists are, when they get sick or need care or get toothache.

Jeremy Corbyn incidentally was the very first person almost immediately after the referendum to say we should trigger article 52 immediately, until his own Blairite infested party shouted him down.

Or we have the situation in which in London now, as the white British people are now a minority there (the inner part of it), even white middle class professionals cannot afford to live there any more, and many are having to commute ridiculous distances to get there, simply because there are too many people there so property prices and rents which function on supply and demand economics whether anybody likes that or not, have gone “through the roof” – i.e. Londoners (those whose ancestors have lived in London for centuries) cannot afford to live in London any more.

The reason this unrealism has set in, that for anybody to object to immigration or overpopulation – which now amounts to the same thing where a country is very small like this one (the UK – does anybody realise that England (not the UK, England) is between 2 and 4 times as overcrowded as France or Germany? No, I thought not) – is because the people who have the loudest voice these days are smug middle and upper class people who don’t see immigration as a threat to them – like the people who work at the BBC or the Guardian – whereas the masses, the poor people, fighting for the few remaining jobs and desperate shortage of affordable housing are incandescent about it, and that’s why the Brexit vote happened, and that’s why Boris Johnson just got elected, even though Jeremy Corbyn would have brought more social justice and funded the public services better.

So please, don’t anybody get self-righteous with me, because whether my views are right or wrong, I am on the side of the majority, the masses, and not the “I’m all right jack people.”

For the same reason I am a zealous critic of the lockdown, as it’s hitting the poorer and older people the hardest, and again, the smug middle/upper class people aren’t worried about it for the usual reasons, as they think they’ll somehow come out unscathed, and are apparently far more worried that the poor people will infect them if they let them out of “prison” too soon.

So hopefully that now has given people here an idea of where I am coming from, of whose side I am on – not as I hate rich people or wealthy people, I am just pointing out they are not being responsible for the masses as they should be, they have abdicated their responsibility under the delusion that the masses can “take care of themselves” in a more or less “let them eat cake” way.

That’s the sort of attitude that precedes revolutions obviously, and the Brexit vote was a sign of that revolution mounting – the BBC’s Andrew Neill actually called it “a peasant’s revolt”.

So it matters not where anyone here thinks I am a racist (which I’m not, I have had many friends of all races, and helped them out in ways you would not imagine), the point is, because in polls for many years now 75% of the population or more (i.e. the masses, not those at the Guardian or at the BBC) want immigration cut or stopped, and that’s why they voted for Boris Johnson.

And so then all this stuff people here are objecting to or calling for such as more green policies, has got absolutely no chance of getting carried out.

Because due to this PC Blairite domination of the Labour party that has precisely this same unrealistic attitude – oh, let’s have another 50 million immigrants here, we’ll just build more houses (which they aren’t doing, and hardly anybody wants built near them) and do organic farming so we’ll have more food (so they tell me, I remain unconvinced), the public won’t vote for a Jeremy Corbyn or a green candidate (in anywhere apart from “cosmopolitan” Brighton), so any political party that tries to push green policies is doomed, because the masses are so opposed to more immigration that no Green or “Socialist” party says they will stop.

So you see, I’m such a friend (you know, this “illuminati plant” I’m being accused of) of the elite who want to poison all our food and microchip us etc, that I have many times here suggested (and nobody hardly ever supports it) a policy of full proportional representation, so parties like the Greens – who got about 1 million votes in recent elections, but only 1 seat – they’d get roughly 13 seats under full PR, which could like the DUP in N Ireland with Theresa May give them a lot of power – would have a chance.

You see, people seem to think I am against organic farming or in favour of pesticides or GM food or whatever, which I am not saying at all (though I am most definitely in favour of population control) and am not.

I am just saying, that it’s like when you vote – you are not going to get Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus or Buddha or whoever into power any time soon, as they are not on the candidate lists for now.

You have to keep doing realism, which amounts to choosing “the lesser of two evils.”

You cannot turn supreme evil into supreme good, or terrible chaos into total order overnight.

It has to be done slowly by steps, though massive changes can come quickly given the right circumstance – e.g. proportional representation voting, so you can vote for what you believe in instead of at present, having to vote tactically or your vote not even counting at all.

That’s the problem for me with conspiracy theorists in general. Yes, it’s all very well crticising the fractional reserve banking system, but tell me please exactly how you change it?

I don’t know. Do we stop giving loans? The Muslims seem to have interest free loans, but that sounds to me like we’d all have to pay for banking, instead of it being funded by the interest on those who used credit.

So do you want to have another bill of £100 or £200 or who knows how much more by having to pay for banking, if interest based banking was abolished?

So these problems are just not simple to solve – all the people crying out “this is wrong”, “that is wrong” – well, yes, I probably agree with you, but unless you are actually in a position of authority and therefore then are held responsible for your decisions, it’s all very well to criticise, but until you try putting things into practice in the real world it’s too easy to criticise the authorities without actually proving you can do any better.

Or let’s take Bill Gates. Firstly, no doubt millions envy/hate him, just because he’s so rich.

But most of the population uses his software and products every day (yes, I’m well aware he didn’t even design MS-DOS himself which preceded Windows, but that’s how big business always works), but like I said, if you don’t like it – vote with your feet/wallet, which I do.

I don’t use any Microsoft product if I can avoid it (but if they are giving it away free, like Internet Explorer, who cares) I use open source stuff like Linux and so on.

But that’s a tougher learning curve and I still use old Windows software for some things because I have programs that won’t work on Linux I haven’t found adequate substitutes for as yet.

So I’d suggest please stop judging people you don’t know much about as you’ve done me, as you have got really no idea of what my life situation is, but it certainly isn’t enviable I can assure you of that.

But specifically as to one or two criticisms made.

As to the overpopulation, people are advising me to read the works of whoever telling me how great it is, but I am afraid they are suggesting something which overlooks commonsense or only applied to a different era (thanks to the commenter who pointed that out) when the population of planet earth was only 1 billion.

I mean to put it briefly, think which countries have been having famines, starvation – Africa, China, India – the ones with the absolutely massive populations, and Russian also in recent centuries, because the climate can’t easily support such a huge population.

I rather think if any of my critics here had been starving for a while they might think twice about their ideas on overpopulation if they’d been in one of those countries/continents with enormous populations that can’t easily feed itself.

And you know, while they might think they are “socialist”, they should be aware they have got an avid supporter for these “no need to control population or conserve resources” in right wing American icon Ann Coulter – who said/wrote in one of her bestsellers (roughly from memory) “no need for conservation or population reduction, we’ll just start settling on Mars” (you know, they’ve sent Matt Damon to Mars to prove it can be farmed – please….)

Then as to GM food. Yes, like I said, I try to avoid it if I can, but probably can’t, the people who put labels on tins/packets probably don’t even know if there are GM components in the food item (e.g. sugar in tinned beans) any more.

But there’s no question if you genetically modify seeds in the right way you can quickly grow foods that are say much bigger, so I’m afraid it’s simply arithmetic that if you grow an orange or tomato in the same square foot of land that is twice the size, that is going to feed twice the number of mouths.

So if you want to argue with me that 2 x 4 = 8 is wrong, fine, but I don’t think I’ll reply to that one.

And OK, people are having a lot of health problems due to all these chemicals now, and things like plastic are causing a lot of pollution.

But first, find me a good alternative to plastic as I can’t think of one, and I’ve been trying for quite some time.

But as to chemicals in food the science is not certain on hardly anything. I mean, if you eat too much salt it will kill you, and salt has been around in huge quantities before life even began.

And I mean there’s just 1000s of these things, and not only stuff in food, but things like aluminum in pans, and of course there was (and to some degree still is) the asbestos problem.

And then the stuff that’s in computers, a lot of which it tells you is deadly to human life if you get too much contact with it in one way or another.

So shall I suggest everybody who is worried about that immediately stops using their computer?

In which case they won’t be able to downvote me or slag me off again?

I think I already know the answer to that suggestion.

So that is, we all seem quite willing to take risks with things like microwaves coming out of our mobile phone when it’s something we really want to do, but we do nothing but point the finger when we are not actually sure if something is a threat or is not.

I mean, there’s an awful irony here, because in fact, it’s precisely this level of paranoia that has caused the lockdown – people who made the molehill into a mountain, and have now locked us up on account of it.

And sorry, I’m not buying this is just a further act of “global tyranny” trying to take our rights away, as above all, it appeared to me they have done that already! – we’ve already had our free speech seriously damaged, and TASER weapons of torture, disallowed even in wars under the Geneva convention I’d assume (to be used on POW’s), now allowed to be used on us probably even if we dare to break the lockdown.

I don’t actually think however that is any great change in government policy throughout the ages – it would have happened at any time throughout the ages just as soon as the technology was available.

As I keep saying there is nothing we can do about tyranny other than try to get the tyrants out of government, which means we need to change the voting system while we’ve still got some semblance of democracy – which of course they really don’t in other countries like China and so on.

So fine, it’s everybody’s right to criticise, and I knew I’d likely get “a kicking” when I wrote it (and probably will get another one now).

But I think it’s the truth so that’s why I continue – if the site owners want to ban me that’s up to them, but of course that would invalidate their own philosophy then of what this site is supposed to be all about I would have thought.

I mean I look at articles like this, and fine, very good exercising of free speech.

But frankly, most of the articles here terrify people to death if they take them seriously.

In summary they nearly all give the message routinely “the bad guys are now doing this, that, the other, be afraid, be very very afraid…”

But short of going and hanging yourself, is any solution ever suggested as to what we can do about the tyranny? I mean I am just a downtrodden citizen like everybody else here – obviously I must have time on my hands for one reason or another, but being “a paid stooge” of illuminati is definitely not the reason, and I am not at all denying such people are possible here, but in my view at least some of them are probably attacking me.

I mean, do you think these people are scared of conspiracy theorists? (I mean the people they are working for).

They laugh at conspiracy theory, they’ve made sure the MSM won’t buy it even if it’s totally true (which no doubt it is from time to time, or at least partially so).

But if anybody (like me) actually suggests we do anything about it, that’s what worries them in the extreme.

But of course I’m not remotely suggesting anything illegal, which of course makes it all the more threatening to them, because they can deal with that.

No, instead I’m suggesting we campaign to get proportional representation and get control over candidate lists, by democratically voting for the electoral candidates instead of letting some non-democratic committee or “executive” body decide without any vote – i.e. we need to deselect all candidates routinely at every election and get some democratically selected ones there by local people party member votes.

That’s why Jeremy Corbyn got to leadership – because it was a democratic vote of members, but then he got effectively “assassinated” by all the candidates and MPs who didn’t get chosen on a proper democratic basis and never get deselected.

So if an “illuminati stooge” writes stuff like I’ve just done, suggesting we get real representative democracy instead of the sham we’ve got now where government just bows down to the rich and corporations all the time, I’m afraid nothing else I can say can convince anyone.

Which by the way doesn’t say we should get rid of corporations, but reform them, have them under government control instead of the government being controlled by them; and yes, of course get them to pay fair taxes like everyone else is forced to do (and quite often unfairly – the tax authorities target the little people too much and the big people too little for their “investigations.”)

And I mean, back to Bill Gates – I mean there’s people attacking him as “a white Messiah” – I mean to me that’s a racist statement in itself – what’s wrong with a Messiah of any colour? – I’ll settle for a white, black or yellow Messiah thank you very much, as long as they do good.

And I think he is doing quite a lot of good on this issue (reducing starvation), even if it isn’t yet ideal: as I said, you go ask the starving millions themselves, would they rather have (temporarily at least) GM food, or none?

So please don’t think you can answer for them.

So fine, criticise what I write all you like anybody, but at least try to present solutions, though if I think they are unrealistic, I will either say why or simply ignore them.

Perhaps finally I should say about the people who criticised me for the length of my posts.

Well fine,if they don’t like them, don’t read them.

But I would say in my defence I am trying to do this for the public good, and it actually causes me a lot of hard effort to do this, and a lot of time, and so as long as some people still find it valuable – I did get 2 likes to date for the last one – I will continue, but it would likely take me another hour to edit it down and as I’m exhausted already, I just can’t do that I am afraid, though at times, I actually do cut it down quite a lot.

Keir Hardie – the founder of the Labour party – and this is around 100 years ago – complained that Scottish bosses were importing Eastern Europeans to undercut Scottish Labour, and 100 years later the bosses are still doing that in the entire UK and West generally, but they’ve managed to con even a lot of socialists into believing it’s racism to object to this.

And in the recent Labour Leadership election (anyone remember that?), the female candidates were falling over themselves to support the Trans lobby in its bizarre aims, like allowing men who identified as women to complete in women’s sports. Many of these aims were opposed (rightly so IMHO) by long-standing feminists.

You make some good points, but it’s hard to see the wood for the trees in such a forest of a post. May I constructively suggest, if you intend to make any more posts of such a length that you structure them into sections with headings and heading numbers. And use plenty of spacing. It may make them easier to read and follow.

BTW, for a socialist such as yourself, surely you can see that the main objection people have to Bill Gates (in addition to his self-satisfied punchable face) is that his obscene wealth buys him an inordinate amount of unaccountable power and influence. That cannot be healthy.

Firstly, I’d point out (I’m usually careful to say this, but may occasionally forget to) as I said above, I’m mainly a socialist.

i.e. while in theory I’d support a totally socialist state and world in which money didn’t even have to exist – there’s no money in Nature, but on the other hand animals do fight al the time over territory, so maybe money helps avoid that to a large degree, at least domestically – in practice I feel it’s a bit trickier.

i.e. the problem with a sudden total socialist revolution – e.g. Russia/China in the 20th C – is how you get the best people in jobs and positions of authority of all kinds.

People who start and run successful businesses are likely by nature to be dictators (e.g. Alan Sugar is clearly one, and not a very high minded individual in my view, but note how the BBC glorifies him, makes him into a (thoroughly bad in my view) example to be emulated) but they also have enormous energy and an ability to get things done that a lot of other people don’t have.

There was a guy back in the 70s/80s who was agent for everyone from tennis star John McEnroe to the then Pope, called Mark McCormack, and he said “with some people you can solve half a dozen difficult problems in 30 minutes, and with others you couldn’t solve one relatively simple problem in 30 years.”

And I am sure from your own experience you will know this to be the case, that some people can get a job done quickly, even if it’s not perfect, but then you get the perfectionist or merely impractical (but idealistic, you see) one, who either takes ages or procrastinates to the degree they never get anything done.

So yes, as you rightly pointed out, it’s not right people like Bill Gates should have enormous power just because they are rich, so that’s why in case you missed it (near the end) I said we needed governments to control corporations and not the other way round, and the rich (those who own the corporations) to be taxed properly.

But I don’t think that having rich people per se is the actual problem, it’s just when there are too many poor people who don’t have enough.

I mean, a lot of people might agree with the policies of their local Green MP, but as I said, would they really like to put them in charge of their food supply? And they might say – Ok guys, we don’t need corporations any more – like the one who owns the massive farms in the mid-West of America which apparently feeds an enormous part of the world’s population – but instead we’ll all turn our gardens into allotments.

And then says they are going to give everybody fishing rods so you can go down to the river for dinner (hoping to catch one bigger than a tiddler before dark), and we’re going to shut down the national grid and instead you are going to get a free (this shows how great the new policies are) wind generator in your back garden – and hey, if it’s not windy, and because we haven’t invented efficient storage batteries yet, then even if you have to sit in the dark, don’t forget, you’re saving the planet, and stopping global warming, so be proud, etc….

I mean, I’m really not taking the mickey, but if you put the wrong people into power – as well intentioned as they may be – quite a lot of the “Green people” would put us back nearly into the Middle Ages or possibly even further.

So while they might be happy living in wigwams sitting around (somehow not polluting) camp fires smoking “peace pipes” (I think you know what I mean), I certainly wouldn’t and I doubt most other people would either.

I mean, generally I did feel there was a deficiency in what I wrote, in that I didn’t make it clear enough perhaps that I am not attacking conspiracy theorists per se, I am just saying that I think that the articles should be “solution based” instead of “problem based.”

e.g. we can debate the global warming issue till the cows (possibly don’t, if the environment collapses sufficiently) come home, but I’m pretty sure the climate change deniers and the “global warmers” are not much going to change their views, no matter how much “evidence” is presented.

But my view on that is (for which I usually get hammered by all sides) why argue about it, but instead why don’t we focus on reducing our dependency on fossil fuels.

Not by uglifying the landscape with huge numbers of wind farms (though I’d support that as an interim measure) but by developing nuclear fusion, which is as far as I can see the only solution that would be as acceptable to the deniers as the “warmers” – i.e. abundant cheap energy with no polluting waste products.

So therefore it appears to me the main target of the campaigners/”conspiracy theorists” should be exposing why so little money is put into research for nuclear fusion generators, which really is minuscule, and pointing out to all concerned, that if this was successfully achieved, equally the “fracking” problem (which certainly makes me nervous) would go away with it.

But again, arguments against fracking need to be solution based

e.g. if we tell the capitalist venturers who want to do this to make money (as usual), fine, give it a go, but only do it out in uninhabited areas and not near big population areas where it might cause earthquakes, bring up poisons etc; then at least that will be far less potentially damaging.

Anyway, good luck surviving the lockdown and thanks again for your thoughts.

Thanks for giving me the biggest laugh I’ve had for a long time, which as such, deserves a good reply – I’ll try my best in the short time available…

I mean, seriously, I’ve actually been giving this – sort of – quite a lot of thought!

Not so much the Hazmat suits – which of course must be worn by all citizens at all times till the universe implodes back into the “super-black hole” – but the face masks which are in some countries attempted to be forced on the citizens and quite possibly here also – in certain situations is my guess, such as in crowded areas or by certain workers who deal with a lot of the public.

I think somehow we could have fashionable ones like some kind of probably silk patterned cowboy bank robber style masks – personally I’d like the right to wear a matching gun belt too, but that’s apparently illegal in the UK, not so sure about America.

I’m not sure however if the average high street bank would be too keen if a lot of people started coming through the door who looked like bank robbers.

The other irony of course is that in a Western world that has been attacking Muslim women wearing face coverings, now all of a sudden the government wants us all to wear them…

Perhaps it if leads to a lot of robberies and they can’t identify people as they are wearing the face masks, they’ll have second thoughts about it.

As the saying goes when one gets fleeced over an extortionate shopping purchase: At least Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask!

I am not going to thumb you down for your passionate but long winded treatise. However, there is one point you make which cannot be left unchallenged:

“You have to keep doing realism, which amounts to choosing “the lesser of two evils.”

So you are instructing us not to vote for “third parties” who espouse policies that are congruent with our moral and ethical compass ? No wonder there are psychopaths ruling this world.

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Paul Vonharnish

Apr 25, 2020 3:57 PM

Marx in volume 1 of Capital writes

“Capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil…The social combination and organization of the labor processes is turned into an organized mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom and independence…

Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology…only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

Whoever it was that gave you a thumbs down here probably regards you as an extreme, left wing, Marxist, socialist, anti-semite. Well, dear Paul, you can rest assured that I don’t share the views of these rampant sociopaths.

Yes, I admit I might have been using rather colourful rhetoric there but in the end, you will have to let others consider you as they wish – I would have no problems sharing your company in discussion in real time – but unfortunately, at the present time that is verboten ! However, your comment “Infinity suggests that every individual is infinitely outnumbered” is something that I will have to ponder deeply – thank you for that

It’s a very interesting observation, but Marx did not create it ex nihilo. He synthesised his observations from studying the works of earlier and contemporary observers like Liebig and Schonbein in Germany, and he was much interested in John Tyndall’s work that outlined the science of the greenhouse effect in the Earth’s climate. And Marx had a personal friendship with the early ecologist Lankester, who introduced the term ‘oecology’ to English in 1873.

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Brian Sides

Apr 25, 2020 2:48 PM

Little changes back in 1961 we were shown a film at school and asked to write a report on it.
The film showed tractors with various attachments for ploughing and reaping being supplied to farmers in Africa.
I was the only one to write a critical report. It was obvious to me that the film was a public relation piece by the company. Traditionally farmers in the third world will use a animal to pull a plough.
If the tractors were left after filming you would need to train people how to use them as they can be dangerous to use untrained. The tractors would need to be maintained and were more suitable for farming larger areas than the small plots available in the villages.
Needless to say my report got very poor marks for hand writing , spelling , punctuation , grammar.
The contents was not appreciated either.

What’s next Antsie? Boils? Rivers turning to blood? Boils? Darkness? Death of the first-born?

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Gezzah Potts

Apr 25, 2020 9:29 AM

Thank you Colin for another excellent article. I’m just angry. Capitalism is the disease, not the cure. It is both anti human and anti the planet.
Deeply disturbing to read the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are now collecting seeds from all over the world and storing them in Svalbard.
Imagine how the future is looking very likely to be – a global digital currency, mandatory vaccinations, a social credit system and giant corporations like Cargill controlling food production. Jesus.

Thanks CS…. Regards philanthropy, Wrong Kind Of Green has a whole section on its front page on the plethora of NGO’s being funded by the likes Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, Soros, et al.
The relevant question being ‘why would billionaires be funding so called grassroots movements or NGO’s?
Quote for you from’ Saving Trees and Capitalism Too’ by Michael Barker:

“describing a group funded by the world’s leading capitalist elites as grassroots demonstrates how desperately well meaning environmentalists cling to the illusion that by working with capitalists they will be able to counter the destruction wrought on the planet by capitalists”.

Excellent doco called The Planet Of Humans that exposes the mainstream ‘environmental groups’ like 350.org and Sierra Club being co-opted by the very same people pillaging the planet being funded by these oh so generous ‘philanthropists’. Lots of other examples as you’d know.
Grey cold morning in Melbourne – will read that Peter Joseph essay now, thanks. Like your moniker by the way✌️

Thank you Gezzah strengthening the international alliance for justice ! You in Melbourne Australia and me in London England – Thank you for the Michael Barker quote – I will have to get that book to add to my collection of research material – and I can recommend to you some other brilliant authors such as Vijay Mehta author of “The Economics of Killing” and “How Not To Go To War”, Hazel Henderson author of “Alternative Futures”, Fritjof Capra author of “Uncommon Wisdom” and “The Tao of Physics” Max Blumenthal, author of “The Management of Savagery” and Fritz Schumacher author of “Small is Beautiful”. And yes, my moniker is great, that is until a dyslexic appears on the scene ! Keep posting Gezzah – and remember these words of the great Jesse Ventura – “When Governments Lie – The Truth is a Traitor”

✌️😁 Cheers Nemo…. I echo Cupid in that connecting with other like minded people is important. Especially now.
The few I know personally, fully swallow the MSM bullshit – nearly all read The Guardian or its Aussie equivalent .

Yes, Gezzah, and like you and many others here, I echo all views expressed that celebrate the sanctity of human life and the importance of fighting with all our might against all those who are prepared to collude with those who wish to snuff it out wherever it may sprout up – Choose Life – Choose Compassion – Choose Enlightenment ! Our strength is in our unity and our power is in our solidarity – and, despite the continuing efforts of the living dead – we will win !

Your welcome Gezzah, sorry about the late reply. My emails being swamped with reply notifications, but that’s a good thing. Like you say, it’s important to connect. I’m new to posting but have followed you for quite a while. Good work Brother.

No problemo Nemo… End of the day, we’re all in the same boat. Here’s one of the seemingly few places left where people get what is really going on.
True, connection is important, especially in these uber surreal times.
Take care✌️

Targeted philanthropy? Are apple trees philanthropic? Or do we enter into a bargain when we pluck the apple and eat whereby we are obligated to plant the apple seeds?[without patenting the genome for sale]/s

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Moneycircus

Apr 25, 2020 8:10 AM

Esso-Exxon-Standard Oil grandaddy J.D. Rockefeller was, literally, a snake oil salesman before he started prospecting for kerosine, which he was selling for its health benefits. He profited by bottling obscure chemical elixirs and marketing them for their supposed curative properties. Gates is also promoting chemicals and their magical health benefits. Chemicals to make the soil sprout more crops. Chemicals to make you healthier.
Both Rockefeller and Gates became rich through monopoly. Both were investigated for restricting trade and conspiring to undermine their business rivals. Both were targeted for trust busting, though Gates has gotten off more lightly.
Both families have an active interest in eugenics. The parallels are striking. To return to crimes, however.
Billionaires get a free pass for cornering the market, nowadays. The actions of Bezos and Amazon, Zuckerberg and Facebook, Gates and Microsoft seem to be monopolistic, possibly illegal, and yet they don’t merit so much as an investigation these days. We no longer do class politics, only identity politics. You won’t get flayed in the press or prosecuted in the courts for oppressing a country or a race but you may, for offending an individual.
It’s widely said that to be white, male and a patriarch is a toxic combination. So…… how are these billionaires also getting away with that offense? How did the patriarchy suddenly get inverted? How is the white, working class male toxically privileged, but Bill Gates is not? Who is the patriarch?
Not many results if you Google ‘Bill Gates’ and ‘patriarchy’. Strangely you do get “Bill Gates is a huge fan of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence research.” Hey, one elite dynastic white dude is a huge fan of another elite dynastic white dude!
When it comes to Bill and Melinda Gates it is fringe-worthy to suggest that they speak for the power of white, corporate America. Meanwhile academia accepts the Gates funding gender studies and women’s equality – and contraception, of course – without questioning their intentions.
The rest of the article is here: https://moneycircus.blogspot.com/2020/04/gates-rockefeller-and-mysterious.html

Just gone to your site and read your article “US Peas – A Russian Pod” – in my humble opinion a very perceptive piece of writing which presents a very balanced view, free of any emotional histrionics – you should post it up here for the benefit of all !

Thank you for the comment. I’ll look for a related story to post it to.

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1of7billion

Apr 25, 2020 1:49 AM

In theory I’m a big supporter of green and non-corporation based policies, but I think it’s not that easy to put them into practice when you’re trying to feed a world of over 7.5 billion people.

That is to say, it might be better to feed everybody food that’s a bit poisonous – i.e. that is produced by use of pesticides – than not feed people at all.

Starvation isn’t a nice way to die, seriously, dying of covid-19 is far preferable.

The problem we have with environmental issues like how to produce abundant safe healthy food, is the same one we have with global warming, and with covid-19.

The science simply isn’t there in a cast iron form to tell us what foods are safe and what are not.

I mean, there is no such thing as 100% purity, there has always been something that is bad for humans, that one might call poisonous, in every food ever produced.

Not only that, it is very obvious now from allergy information that some foods (e.g. peanuts) can be bad or even lethal for some people, but for others they are just a tasty and nutritious snack.

The same applies to GM food. I mean, my instinct personally is to avoid it, though that is probably not even possible now. I don’t think anybody even knows any more if they are eating it in something or other they cannot verify the full origins of.

Again, I am unable to resist returning to covid-19 – nobody knows (except for the minority tested, and even they can’t be sure) if they have it or not, and probably nobody knows for certain if there are GM food components in what they are eating any more.

All these chemicals that never existed before the industrial revolution are now going into the air, water, seas and oceans, and earth, and into the food chain, so again, it is probably more difficult now to avoid eating some GM food that it is to avoid getting exposed to covid-19 – i.e. in both cases, it is probably going to happen sooner or later, and for a large part of the population also in both cases, probably already did.

I mean, at a glance, this article makes Bill Gates seem like some sort of a cloven-hooved devil, sowing poisonous seed with the deliberate aim of murdering children or mass culling of humanity or whatever.

But I looked him up on Wikipedia, and I don’t think that’s the truth – he seems to do quite a lot of genuine charitable work, especially funding education for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

I mean here’s a National Geographic article, and again – at a glance, he looks like he is trying to do a lot of good things, albeit using capitalist organised methods.

I mean, he might be misguided, but I am sorry, I just can’t see him as an evil man.

These problems of starvation, malnutrition, lack of healthcare, education, clean water, etc, etc, in Africa – they aren’t ones that can be dealt with by Oxfam sending a few convoys of food, they are absolutely massive problems – 1.2 billion people to feed, cloth, provide healthcare for etc. in Africa – including if you just give these countries money, the local dictators may well just spend it on luxuries and parties for themselves, and let the people continue to starve and have no water or healthcare, etc.

Or for example, let’s talk about feeding the 65 million people in the UK, which has suddenly become a very topical issue right now, with people even feeling uncertain about the food supply, for the first time probably since rationing finished following WWII.

Even on this website, I’d like to see a poll of all the people who think we should just dump all the corporations who currently provide most of our food, and instead we’ll just all start up allotments or something and “go green” like “The Good Life” comedy series.

I mean, the people who try to be self-sufficient like crofters on remote Scottish islands, they work like hell and they barely survive.

This easy, comfortable life in the sense of having the basics of life – food, water, shelter, lighting, heating, sanitation, etc, we in the developed world have, despite this horrible lockdown, in which we don’t have to dig in the dirt or chase or fish some animal, but just take a packet out of the freezer and stick it in the microwave or whatever – none of this would be possible without these corporations.

Yes, no doubt they are doing a lot of things to our food that aren’t good for us.

But as I said, the bottom line is that as things now are, with this enormous national and world population, we’d all starve without them, and that is not a joking matter – most people easily turn cannibal for example when they are desperate enough for food, it’s simply outside of the experience of British people in particular in modern history to be that short of food.

Being an island of course helps, because nobody is more than about a hundred miles or so from the sea in which they are always fish.

But that’s not a solution now, when you are competing with 65 million other people for food if it gets in short supply.

There’s no question of course we should all try to avoid dodgy or poisonous things in our food to the extent we can.

I think people have to “vote with their feet” to force corporations to change their behaviour.

e.g. one of my biggest gripes is the artificial sweeteners that they are sticking in everything in sight nearly now, because of our overweight epidemic, as a substitute for sugar.

But my instinct tells me it’s not a good idea to put a substance into the body that makes the body think it just had sugar when it didn’t.

Some research says it is causing problems with insulin production in the liver, so may be more harmful for you than sugar, unless you’re having an awful lot of sugar. But I’m not assuring anybody that is true, all I’m saying is I personally am nervous about it, so avoid any foods that have this stuff in which nearly all softs drinks do – sucralose.

But it apparently isn’t bothering most of the population, who just see it as a way to avoid getting fat, or fatter than they are already.

So unless the public “votes with its feet” (or wallet really) and says “I’m not buying it”, the manufacturers/corporations will still keep doing it that way.

Same applies to GM food obviously. Bill Gates just doesn’t believe GM food is dangerous, and I don’t know if there is any proof either way – it’s just like global warming or covid-19 or anything else – there are scientists on one side and on the other.

But GM food can definitely produce a lot more food, so whether he is right or wrong, Bill Gates obviously favours it because it can feed more people, whether or not there are problems with that, I personally cannot say.

This is the trouble with all this environmental science – scientists can do “research” that tends to find out the results they want.

So environmentalists will do research that “proves” that product or practice x that a corporation wants to do is not safe, e.g. claim it will cause disease, cancers, or whatever, and the corporation has its scientists who find the opposite results.

How is the public to know the truth? Do even the scientist know the truth?

For example it’s 39 years since HIV first appeared in 1981 and still no vaccine.

It appears to me that because we cannot be certain scientifically about various issues, such as the safety of GM food, we should instead be looking at the motives of those producing it or supporting it, such as in this case, Bill Gates believing (with clear evidence) he can feed a lot more people using GM food because he can get bigger crop yields, faster growth even.

But if we didn’t have massive overpopulation, especially in Africa, the food supply wouldn’t be such an issue, we’d be in far less danger of starvation, and able to supply food from countries that had too much to ones where there was a shortage.

And I just don’t hear environmentalists talking about this issue – the fact our planet has maybe twice as many people as it can comfortable handle. That’s just a guess, but I personally think for example the UK has about twice as many people as it can handle for such a small country, and to have this massive population here is a serious risk to everyone – and that’s not any kind of a racist statement, it’s just a population one, regardless of the racial composition of the population.

You know, say you have a small tropical island and there’s so many sheep and cows on it and fruit trees and so on, so it can feed a population with a thousand people on it.

But put two thousand on it, especially very suddenly, and not only might a lot of people go hungry, they might even be killing each other fighting over food.

It may sound paradoxical, but as in China, where they adopted a policy of only 1 child per couple to prevent starvation, the biggest “killer” soon may not be all the pesticides etc in our food, but simply overpopulation – too many people all competing for too few resources.

And environmentalists hardly seem to breathe a word about this.

Perhaps it’s time they did.

I’m not suggesting genocide, but measures involving the better global distribution (aka sharing) of food in a secure manner, such that in places like Africa they don’t have to breed incessantly in the hope that a few of their children will survive in order to look after them in their old age.

Birth control is going to be one of the main issues very soon I am sure, because nobody in authority is talking about this massive global (and in many countries like the UK, national) overpopulation. But they soon will be, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this covid-19 crisis pushes it very close to or even to the very top of the agenda.

Africa needs a policy of population control and assurance of secure food supply in exchange for the public agreeing to start using birth control methods like more or less all Western nations do.

Bill Gates isn’t perfect no doubt, but for the moment, he’s probably doing more about that than anybody else, as it appears to me national governments are doing nearly nothing to deal with poverty and malnutrition and starvation in Africa and other places where similar problems occur.

But as to the purity and safety of food – the public will only get that when they demand it, by “voting with their feet/wallets” – refusing to buy stuff that they think might damage their health.

Maybe the trillions we spend on our fucking wars could be put to making the world a better place so that people are happy. Maybe we shouldn’t be poisoning the soil and forcing the farmer to head to a packed city to live like an animal. Maybe when more of the earth is green and well irrigated, then people would spread out and you wouldn’t feel like getting rid of “excess” human beings. Maybe then organic, healthy food wouldn’t be a choice that we would have to make with our “wallets/feet”. Maybe when there’s less misery, then you wouldn’t need a megalomaniac with a White Saviour Complex bringing “solutions” to the world of darkies.

You may ramble on a bit, there, but your assertions are false. Organic farming routinely produces equal or slightly better yields when compared to gm crops, the latter being inevitably prone to their own unique problems, as it turns out.

Moreover, planet Earth could support roughly 2 1/2 times the current population — that’s the “carrying capacity ” of the planet — if all arable land were properly used. And if we were perfectly efficient, so round down, to, say, 2x’s current population. (Incidentally, proper grassland management REQUIRES the use of grazing animals; they’re part of the natural ecosystem. So let’s eat some of ’em, lest they over-populate; that’s all-natural, too. Predators, you know. Meat: That’s what the human organism evolved, survived, and thrived on. 🙂

But not to worry about the planetary population—

Current estimates are for a peak in global population at about 9 billion around 2050, with a steep decline after that, bringing us right back down to 7 billion within about 25 years. (!) But the decline ain’t a-gonna just stop at 7 billion. And THAT’S something to worry about, fer you youngsters out there.

See, as long as the birth rate remains above the replacement rate, the overall increase has a curve to it; we call that “exponential”, of course. Problem is, if it’s exponential on the way up, it’s exponential on the way down, and birth rates are already at or below replacement rates in most of the world. Yes, even in India and China. Every place except sub-Saharan Africa, in fact.

And then there’s this: the declining birth rates have been accelerating in their decline. There’s a rate of change to the rate of change — that’s the 2nd derivative, in calculus — so it’s not only exponential, but “acceleratingly” so. Could be excruciatingly, economically problematic problematic. (Hey, even Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations”, observed that, if periods of economic prosperity coincided with periods of increasing prosperity, the reverse was also true, such as during the plague.)

GM is certainly NOT proven to produce a lot more food. Restricting planting to the highest yielding varieties has been a disaster from the Irish potato blight to the 1930s maize failure and the resulting Mid Western dust bowl.

GM patent holder own the seed yer yer but you can only get one yerw ed and it contracted meaning lasts one season unlike nature forever
GM came out 25 years back remember dolly the sheep feed the world gm will feed the world
did it fuck

It is not the first time I noticed that you are trying to gaslight people. So I have to ask, even though I know you will not answer the question or will ridicule me for asking the question: are you paid to write these articles below the line here?

Well maybe you’re not, but just remember Kurt Vonnegut’s advice that ‘we are what we pretend to be, so we better be careful what we pretend to be’

Guess who owns the National Geographic?
Good old Rupert.
And you read Wikipedia about the most heavily invested man in WHO?
I suppose you watch MSNBC daily?
The MS stands for Microsoft
But he’s a good guy old Bill
The land is fucked because of that roundup
The land which was given to us as humans is now a biohazard in many places.

Do you practice these chatter-fests on your mates down the pub, 1? That’s what they sound like.

Please be aware: best-practice permaculture now easily outmatches poison/oil/greed-driven corporate industagri these days: in productivity (sic!), in cost/benefit ratio (sic, when accounted actually honestly), and in safety and planetary health. Try immersing yourself for a while in the work of – for example – permaculturists Geoff Lawton or Mark Shepard, to name two very different, but equally effective, practitioners, before volunteering (not shilling?) to do apologetics for the toxic/criminal idiocies of corporate industagri.

And do you really expect any savvy reader to take National Geographic and – above all – Wikideceivia seriously as reliable sources of trustworthy facts? Really? Especially about unelected, unaccountable oligarchs like Gates? Precisely the intellectual crook JWales’ kind of favoured person.

Regarding the movements of population-levels: see what Steve X says in this comment tail in reply to you. Apart from the well-dodgy mini-vid series to which he links, he gets it, and he precis it well: Currently, human numbers are **unsustainably** overshot. But Mam Gaia is on the case, and – whatever we little human farties do or don’t do – they will be coming down again before too long.

Oh, and btw: study the art of precis. Produces tremendous benefits! Though maybe in your case go with a one-sixth rule rather one-third.

Cheers 1! Please forgive my old grouch’s brusque style: old dog, new tricks; sorry! No ill will or disrespect intended. Just ribbing a bit! 🙂

Don’t be daft pal. Go to any supermarket and you can see all the food in the bin. Usually surrounded by a fence and cctv these days.
But I admit it is important to be able to go to the supermarket and buy a fresh water melon at 2 in the morning.

Dear “One of Seven Billion” – I don’t hate you – I don’t despise you – I don’t wish you any harm – I will just say that having read your Neo-liberal manifesto, I just hope and pray the the rest of the Seven Billion don’t turn out be like you – for then, if you will kindly excuse my French, we would all be well and truly fucked – Have a nice life – that is assuming you have one.

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Gary Weglarz

Apr 25, 2020 1:23 AM

The interview with Vandana Shiva linked below piqued my interest regarding just what kind of good deeds Bill Gates has been undertaking with his billions among the poor of the world, so I tried to order her latest book on the topic:

Rather oddly I can’t seem to locate a copy anywhere in the U.S. Strange given Ms. Shiva has multiple books currently in print and this is her latest. One is tempted to think her book might be getting the same treatment German reporter Udo Ulfkotte’s book (regarding the close relationship between the intelligence services and MSM) received when it was finally published in English only to then promptly be disappeared for the next 2 1/2 years.

I finally traced the availability of a PDF version of Ms. Shiva’s book to a tiny feminist site, Spinifex Press in Australia. Very strange indeed. Clearly it is time for me to pay more attention to Mr. Gates and his “philanthropy” projects.

Another journalist defending the billionaires, ascribing to Gates/Zuckerberg only the best of motives and to anyone who criticizes them, only the worst of motives.
Because there are no conspiracies in business. Ever! Repeat, ever! Rich people do not get rich by helping each other. They only get rich by accident and because they LOVE YOU.

Apologies for tacking this unrelated point to this articles comment section, but since I don’t have Twitter and have seen OffG participate in the discussion related to this post on there, I just wanted to share one glaring observation about that specific diatribe:

Why in gods name are you repeatedly smiling in a video prefaced with mention of wilful mass death?

This is a common theme amongst the more dogmatic state guidelines advocates, they never seem to take it as seriously as they want everyone else to. Their instinct is either failing them and they are unable to react appropriately in the face of such imminent danger or as is more likely their instincts are working just fine and is out of sync with their hysteria addled minds.

She’s scary. What happened to her? I thought she was a voice of reason. Hey ho, another one dumped. She thinks ending the lockdown makes the rich richer. Well, they’ve just added another $280 billion to their fortunes.

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RobG

Apr 24, 2020 11:49 PM

There seems to be a massive attack on this web site at the moment.

So just a heads up to everyone.

We are in very difficult times, but try not to despair.

The vast majority are sane, and that will prevail. I know it might not seem like that at the moment…

On top of their art and architecture, the Romans built SEWERS that lasted 2000 years. At least the grossly rich assholes of their time could possibly claim to be “elite.” Our “elite” have given us shitty looking rectangles that fall down in 50 years, Basquiat, and Pollock. It’s disgusting, I’m a better painter than that those no talent ass clowns. Why would they even want to live in this cultural abomination with all its wasted potential when they could be building things and investing in art that last for millennia? Calling our fake “elites” non-essential is an understatement! Once you pull the curtain back, the emperor not only has no clothes, he’s getting a rim job from an underage vagrant.

Why would they even want to live in this cultural abomination with all its wasted potential when they could be building things and investing in art that last for millennia? Calling our fake “elites” non-essential is an understatement!

however you paint it – the systems been businetized and basterdized for a Very long time – I certainly wouldn’t say the “elites” are essential – but they’re are many have been content to feed from their plate – use their coin etc…..non ?

😉

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Alan Tench

Apr 24, 2020 9:15 PM

…at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70.
The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer.

Control of the food-chain as a geo-political pressure point has long been a typically Satanic policy objective of Thanatopia aka the USA. Add to that the chance to profiteer, and you have ‘American Moral Values’ naked and unadorned.

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gordon

Apr 24, 2020 8:45 PM

Thousands of satellites are set to be launched for 5G which can send focused beams of intense microwave radiation over Earth; and local urban communities could have cell towers approximately every 500 feet long streets in the near future.

The untested 5G plans of telecom to install millions of cell towers on electric utility poles, public buildings, schools, bus stop shelters, in public parks, and anywhere they want in national parks and on federally owned land has been gaining more and more attention and sparking concern.

This development is troubling for those concerned about constant exposure to radio frequency radiation in close proximity to source; more alarming though is the prospect of beaming millimeter length microwaves back down to Earth from thousands of new communication satellites as SpaceX was given approval by the FCC on 3/29/2018 to launch 4,425 satellites into low orbit around Earth, and the total number expected to be put into low and high orbit will be 20,000 with the biggest being: Spacex at 12,000; OneWeb at 4,560; Boeing 2,956; Spire Global at 972.

The first two 5G test satellites were launched by SpaceX in February of 2018, hundreds more will be launched in 2019, the full set of 20,000 could be in orbit during the next 2 years; for perspective 1,738 operating satellites were in Earth’s orbit as of September 2017. Satellites will be about the size of a small refrigerator and be about 880 pounds with a life expectancy of only 5 years. Once no longer functional they will float around as space junk until they eventually fall and burn up as they enter the atmosphere to then float down to the ground as dust or in rain which may or may not be harmful in itself, all of them. This isn’t even taking into account the damage done by things such as liquids and solid rocket fuels on the environment to launch them.

Phased array antennas will be used to shoot beams of radiation at cell phones; satellites will use the same type of phased array antennas used by the ground based 5G systems, meaning they will send tightly focused beams of intense microwave radiation at each specific 5G device which will in turn send back a beam of radiation to the satellite.

Large antennas are used by tall RF communication towers to send blankets of radiation in all directions at much lower frequencies; broad distribution and lower frequencies of microwaves limits the number of devices that can connect through an individual tower, much shorter 5G length will make it possible to use small phased array antennas to send/receive signals.

Phased array antennas are clusters of hundreds of small antennas working together to shoot a ray of energy out to targets that can be arranged in a 4 inch by 4 inch matrix. Microwave rays produced are said to be strong enough to pass through walls and human bodies, if they weren’t to use a 5G device you would need to stand outside.

5G products will have multiple phased array antennas to generate beams to send back to 5G devices mounted on poles/buildings or towards a specific satellite in space. When in a crowded locations such as an airport or shopping center, there will be hundreds of these invisible beams of much stronger radiation flying through the environment. Whether you have a device or not as you move in these new untested environments the body will be penetrated by numerous beams of radiation by others walking around you and the new towers.

Effective radiation power of 5G phased array antennas in mobile devices will be more than 10 times more powerful than current 4G technology, and no one will be free from exposure. 5G beams will also be received and transmitted from new computer equipment, automobiles, and household appliances; Home/office Wi-Fi hubs will be permitted to use microwave beams that are 15 times stronger than signals from 5G phones or 150 times stronger than 4G.

Arthur Firstenberg explains “When an ordinary electromagnetic field enters the body, it causes charges to move and currents to flow, but when extremely short electromagnetic pulses enter the body [5G], something else happens: the moving charges themselves become little antennas that re-radiate the electromagnetic field and send it deeper into the body.These re-radiated waves are called Brillouin precursors. They become significant when either the power or the phase of the waves changes rapidly enough.5G will probably satisfy both requirements. This means that the reassurance we are being give, that these millimeter waves are too short to penetrate far into the body is not true.”

These untested ground based 5G systems are already being implemented in dozens of major cities right now, with plans being approved for hundreds of other cities allowing implementation in 2019. Cities do not have the right to refuse 5G as FCC regulations prevent cities from objecting on the basis of health concerns, they can only speak to issues of esthetics and practical matters of equipment placing; in fact cities are required to say yes or face legal action for obstructing telecom company plans. You read that right, once more: cities are specifically prohibited from trying to stop or delay telecom companies from 5G implementation based on basis of health concerns.

Today you can live in locations away from cell phone towers to limit exposure, that is now being taken away, it won’t matter where you live 5G will irradiate you everywhere you are. This untested new 5G system will irradiated everyone with millimeter size, non-ionizing radiation 24 hours a day, with completely unknown health effects. Such studies to investigate possible harm will take many years after these systems are fully implemented to find results.

Investment into 5G and lobbyists are massive, and it is planned to be in full implementation within the next few years, untested. Only time will tell what happens, if harm does come what will happen then, will we be told evidence linking 5G to cancer and other disease is only a conspiracy theory saying the science was settled years ago? Why is no one stopping to think how this might affect all life on Earth by altering the electromagnetic energy alone? Shouldn’t this science to be settled now not later before possible harm can come?

It is the sharp falling and rising edges of digital encoded signals which can be problematic in terms of splurious induced emf.
As more information is crammed into the signals to increase bandwith, the more of these edges will occur.
However: The inverse square law means that the radiation Intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
All energy sources have dangers, even a fire early man used to cook his bats on.

Don’t you sometimes feel a certain contrarian pleasure that the Long Descent (qv: add ‘JMGreer’ to the search) away from hitech industrial ‘civilisation’ is already in motion – covid and its attendant socio-economic chaos being a typical, predictable and predicted incident in the unfolding – and seems likely to sweep away all these techno-narcissitic lunacies like 5G within – oh, probably a century; maybe less?

Is it really wrong to think quietly: ‘Good! Roll on!’ Doesn’t seem as if much less than this will finally halt the gangsters-in-charge – the gics – in their gadarene rush to extinction. Clearly they’re not going to listen to calls f.or prudent caution, with the scent of vast profits in their psychopathic nostrils.

Oh well done Off Guardian you’ve broken the [email protected] mould, because i really was getting exceedingly bored with all this covid hysteria

Now i actually happen to enjoy Mr Todhunters writing,unfortunately the vast majority of people in the UK couldn’t give a flying [email protected] about food, only how much it cost, otherwise they’d eat Soylent Green if push came to shove,and be [email protected] happy doing so

Deeply depressing when one thinks about it,oh and no amount of scare stories about food will change the basic dynamic,which is this,British people are fat [email protected] pigs who don’t give a flying [email protected] about anything

But I’ve come to the conclusion that people REALLY don’t give a [email protected] and no amount of scaremongering will change things

The only solution,and I’ve been pushing this for most of this week is to get out,sell up,find some like minded people who live their lifes in a less stressful way,and actually start to live,as opposed to surviving in a state of perpetual self- induced misery

And no that doesn’t mean living a a dull life wearing a hair shirt,or some how copping out

Wow ! – it has now been revealed – “The Wisdom of Crispy” ! If more folks displayed the sort of humility and self-awareness you have surprised us all with here – the world would be a much happier place – and your comment has given me something to reflect upon too – I think I might get a T-Shirt with that printed up on it. Cheers Crispy – I feel much better now !

Why just the British people? Is being short sighted and selfish traits confined to just one locality.

The problem is living by “animal instinct” alone is no way for any society to progress into “a bright future.”

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lensman

Apr 24, 2020 8:24 PM

I have just finished reading a book called the secret life of plants written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. In this book it explains how many good human beings such as the likes of Dr Abram and Dr Ruth.B.Drown and many others have proven time and time again that chemical fertilizers are completely destroying human health and the environment, these peoples research and findings got shut down by big corporations such as the Rockefeller foundation and destroyed by media. This book was published in 1989.
The poisoning of our food has been going on for a very long time as well as the battle to protect it.

In a book called silent spring Rachael Carson makes it clear that the environment, which supports human life is being stressed to the point of collapse.In the u.s Doctors attribute poisonous chemicals to the rise in leukemia, hepatitis, Hodgkin’s disease and other degenerative diseases. A correlation between the rise in the birthrate of mentally retarded children and the increase in poisonous chemicals is stunning.
20,000 mentally ill children were born in 1952. There were 60,000 by 1958. Six years later the number had risen to 126,000, by 1968 was well over 500,000.
According to Dr. Roger j. Williams at the time the book was written one in eight children would have been born with mental disorders.
I wonder what the rates are now?

In 1960 the panel on food additives in president Eisenhowers science advisory committee, which included members of the national academy of sciences, university professors and representatives of the Rockefeller foundation and cancer research institute stated that “Americans today are better fed and in better health than at any time in history. . . The integrated ENGINEERING, AGRICULTURAL AND CHEMICAL SCIENCES have resulted in increasing quantities of uniformly high-quality and pure foods which have contributed demonstrably to the physical well being of the nation.

Really ?

The NFA (Natural food associates) and a man called Nichols (organic farmer/1st president of NFA) blasted the above statement by saying “Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The truth is the us is the most fed yet worst nourished nation on earth. America today is suffering with biological blight. We are facing metabolic disaster. We are a nation of sick people. heart disease is rampaging through america; It is our public enemy no.1. It is the leading cause of death among Americans. Fifty years ago coronary thrombosis was rarely seen by a physician. Today it strikes even the young. . . . Cancer, diabetes, arthritis, dental caries, and other metabolic diseases are rapidly increasing. Even children are falling victim to them.

The secret life of plants is a great read and it really does show you how long these corporations have been poisoning food, the environment and human beings. All deaths and sickness that chemical fertilizers have caused, to which these individuals and corporations are directly responsible should be held to full account of there treachery.

….you know what my friend,we’ve been living in a giant [email protected] petri dish for about,…
well the last century!

Basically humanity is fucked, the only solution is full mind uploading,then the plebs can have all they want without [email protected] the planet to bits,they can live out their useless lives doing shit without harming Gaia 🌿🍀🌈🌳

What IS a ‘mental disorder’? Inability to sit quietly in a regimented classroom? Sounds entirely sane to me. But others call it ADHD. Far better to ask why energetic children are forced to be cooped up by sick adults instead of allowed to be out enjoying freedom as their natures dictate.

Is a mental disorder ‘inablity to disbelieve lies’? Well, childhood is supposed to be about an innocence, a trusting of worthy adults, is it not? You know, ‘growing up’ was finding out that some adults are really dangerous and evil, some men cannot keep their hands to themselves, some women are a danger to all men, let alone other women and, at least according to the bible ‘the love of money is at the root of all evil’…..

What exactly IS a mental disorder when we get down to it?

I think being a monopolist is a mental disorder. A pathological need to dominate for the sake of dominating, not caring one iota what the effect of that pathological need is.

I think a need to impose slavery is a pathological mental disorder. As is being a eugenicist. As is thinking that white skin is superior. As is thinking that being a peepshow pervert grants you superior world rights.

I personally think that Bill Gates has a ‘mental disorder’. So does Elon Musk. So does George Soros. And certainly so does Henry Kissinger.

But the thing is: the people who ‘define’ mental disorders are always asslickers to folks like that. No courtier ever told the king he was as mad as a hatter. Which is why they ended up inbreeding and getting hereditary diseases that wiped out the lineage….

When you say “No courtier ever told the king he was as mad as a hatter.” there was actually one who was allowed to say this kind of thing a long time ago.

The Court Jester or King’s Fool was a fine institution that was abolished when they started taking themselves too seriously. The fool could take the piss out of anyone at Court, including the King, as long as he did it with humour. He could also speak out at any time.

It was a way for the powerful to be aware of what the common man would think, and the humour drew the sting out of the implied criticism. Shakespeare featured many of these characters in his plays.

It died out after the Civil War, probably being seen as unsuitable for the new puritanical zeitgeist.

Perhaps we should bring it back. An official Jester or Fool in Parliament would puncture their egos, especially if given the right to interject at any time. Frankie Boyle would be a good candidate. A mandatory corporate version could also be legislated for too.

Narcissists hate being laughed at, it’s one of our most powerful weapons against them.

Now they are coming for everyone’s money. I heard a German dissident finance guy talk about this coming down the pipe a couple of weeks ago. I think it was a video put up on here. Now lo and behold we have a mainstream UK journalist softening us up for it. Crazy times!

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axisofoil

Apr 24, 2020 8:13 PM

This interview has most likely been seen by most. At Minute 15 in this Dr Shiva talk, he calls out Robert Kennedy Jr. as part of the deep state. Is this true?

I keep an open mind on RFK Jr, but I recognise that he is trying to navigate a political minefield and may therefore make some dodgy compromises. WRT Shiva Ayyadurai, I hadn’t heard of him until about a week ago, but I think that any 56 y/o who claims to have invented email is likely to be a bit of a loon.

axisofoil – I hadn’t noticed you’d already posted this interview – I just finished posting it myself. I’ve been trying to find a hard copy of her new book here in the U.S. and it’s been an impossible task. Very interesting since it was published less than a year ago.

I just tuned into RFK jr. and his work a few weeks ago and now receive his organization’s email updates. I for one deeply appreciate what his organization is doing and why. He always links the science, the studies, when critiquing government policies and behavior.

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Willem

Apr 24, 2020 7:45 PM

So today, when I had a long break from work, I was walking around in my old neighborhood, where I lived as a student. And it just occurred to me how beautiful it is there. And I remembered that I also thought it was beautiful there when I was a student, and that I took the beauty for granted then.

And then a couple of hours later I was driving in my car from work to home. And I listened to one of my old CDs, i.e., Radiohead’s OK computer and The bends. And I remembered that I really liked this music as a teenager. And that I had friends who liked the same music and that we were discussing or humming the tunes: Karma Police, High and Dry, My Iron Lung, Fitter Happier, Street Spirit (fade out). And the lines were very dark like

We’re too young to fall asleep
Too cynical to speak
We are loosing it, can’t you tell?

But we understood. We understood so much back then, maybe more than I understand know. But we weren’t experienced and did not consider the texts to be anything else than poetic. It, for some reason, didn’t resonate for us that the singer was talking to us.

If anything was wrong with my youth, it is that nothing was wrong with it! It was perfect, why would I wanted to have another youth as I had back then. In fact, I don’t.

But it may make the point clear that when you have a perfect life, as so many of my friends and colleagues have in academia, that they will never be able to ‘see’ the beauty and the darkness. It is not that they don’t know it, but they take it for granted, or think it is poetic. They don’t see that the darkness for so many resonates in their lives too. And that beauty is something to be thankful of. It’s the outside world that they like to talk about yet never experience, because they don’t have experience. It is as if they are too afraid to experience.

But at some point you should become experienced. For me, I have had some close encounters with the machine and I learned from that, the hard way, that you have to think for yourself to understand what the world is about and how ugly it can be, but also beautiful. And it’s like my friends and colleagues never had that experience. So here is a question for you: How can you talk with such people about the world outside? – I find that pretty difficult. And certainly when such people are people like your boss.

I told you here about my work as an epidemiologist, and that I am one of the few of my department who still dares to enter the hospital (as it is such a risky environment there and our prime minister advices us to stay at home). And in that way I have become the Covid19 expert in a few weeks time! – Not that anyone really listens to what I have to say there, but I have had my successes…

So I had this e-mail conversation with one my self-isolating bosses (I have more than one boss), who had this idea of writing a grant proposal for ‘second wave’ Covid19 research and if I would like to write a first draft for him. Please bear with me that this is my boss and that he is not really asking a question. Should I just mindlessly follow his phantasy world and write some opportunistic proposal in how we are going to ‘fight this disease’?

And then I thought: man up Willem, and tell him the truth. So I told him that I looked at the proposal requirements and that I didn’t think I could write a proposal, because there was no place to write about what Covid19 wasn’t and that there was also no place to describe how we are going to analyze the wave of terrible consequences due to the decision of locking down the Netherlands.

Of course when you do such a thing, that is swim against the stream, you receive the divine treatment (you will not hear anything about this again) and that is fine. Probably another ‘expert’ will do the job for me, and, who knows, gets the grant (and the promotion).

Did I wake my boss up? – I surely hope so, but probably not. But the morale of this long anecdote is: if you want to wake people up, not going along with their phantasies is the only possible way.

…In terms of alternative news from the hospital, I thought I share this one with you. Now back to the dancing nurses..

The reason they say happiness is a choice, is because you have to CHOOSE to see the beauty in the world. That isn’t always easy to do on this planet, because the ugliness is so pervasive, whereas the beauty is much more subtle. There are still quite a few places however, where this relationship is turned completely on its head. In Utah for instance, in most places you look, the overwhelming beauty of the landscape is so profound that it makes the ugliness of the world seem as small as single tree on the vast mountainside. Here, the beauty is pervasive while the ugliness is much more subtle. It helps your mental health considerably, which in turn fosters an ambition to improve your physical health. If you look at the Covid numbers in this state, we have less deaths per capita than almost any other large population in the world. A state of over 3 million with only 32 official deaths. (no doubt buoyed by the fact that we’re somewhat cut off from the establishment, and they have a harder time cooking the books here). But this is obviously not the case in NYC, Chicago, Detroit, etc, where the ugliness is pervasive, and the people are overwhelmingly miserable and unhealthy. Their mental health is poisoned with fear, anxiety, and a worship of money and consumption, and it shows in the way they’ve let their physical health suffer. These people are miserable, and to make it worse, its of their own choosing. I don’t know if this trend is the same in Europe, but I suspect it is.

I should add that we’re one of 9 US states that didn’t have a lockdown, and we have the best Covid numbers in the country. The media doesn’t mention us, except to keep the weirdness reputation alive, which is just fine by me.

Rosemary Mason’s would of heard of Rachal Carson it monumental in how ridiculous amounts chemicals are allowed to be sprayed each year sometimes several times a year in the us and also e.u
not talking chemtrtails either, this is legal allowed vertically unregulated sprayed on crops forests doesnt matter if it gets in the rivers they do not think like normal folks, that is the issues trying to understand this from a level of human empathy as they do not have any ….

videos and links below show they are beyond batshit crazy

documentary uncovers the astonishing science fraud being carried out by the EPA to legalize the mass pollution of America’s farm lands, school playgrounds and city parks with heavily contaminated industrial waste and human sewage.

By way of a footnote, Icke’s video today starts with the cull that’s going on in UK care homes (something that I’ve been banging on about for the last month). At about 53 minutes in, Icke and his son give high praise to Off Guardian…

I broadly agree with what you say. Thing is, Off Guardian is a small outfit, and Icke recently did a London Real interview that broke all records for online views in the alternate media (of course, this interview, and further ones that Icke did with London Real, have been repeatedly banned by You – are completely fucked – Tube).

I’m not an NHS worker, I was the Primary Carer for my late mother for over a decade. I also have family who are NHS employees and Care Workers. My ex-partner was also an NHS health professional.

My mother was the victim of the psychopaths who masquerade as Senior Clinicians in the NHS, a casualty of their eugenic policies. It is off-topic in this particular thread but when the appropriate opportunity arises I will post a detailed and graphic account of the cruel and inhuman treatment I witnessed, and fought, over two years at the end of her life.

Their actions towards my mother were not personal, others around her were subject to their inhumanity too. I may even write a piece for submission to Off-G, though it would be a lengthy and harrowing read.

I never understood the full implications of the phrase “the banality of evil” until I witnessed what happened in those geriatric wards, care homes, and even in her own home by district nurses and careworkers.

It is the systemic corruption of the elderly peoples medical treatment and care that has been brought about by the “business model” and privatisation respectively that has caused it.

I was in a permanent state of rage after mam’s death for about a year or so, but eventually came to terms with it. Stoicism has usually been my default outlook in life but I was sorely tested by her murder, for that’s what it was.

It was actually a useful experience to prepare me for the present “white coat syndrome” that has gripped the planet. People don’t seem to understand that the medical profession is just as corrupted by mammon as the other professions. They have even stopped taking the hippocratic oath, when I first found that out I wondered why, but as the years rolled by it has become glaringly obvious.

Your salutation to stay sane is the perfect rejoinder to those who use stay safe as a verbal form of passive aggression when out in public. I picked it up from you a while ago on this site. I like your style.

I worked in hospitals for years. Doctors are often not ‘healers’ at all, but medical businessmen. Slack incompetence by a GP killed my father, grotesque and vicious incompetence by a locum GP killed my mother, and in-patient surgical incompetence and slackness killed my brother-in-law. I’ll go into a hospital willingly under almost no circumstances.

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S Cooper

Apr 24, 2020 6:53 PM

World Lock Down 2020. Brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Eugenics and Euthanasia Foundation (Henry Alfred Kissinger, President) in cooperation with the Wilhelm Schallmayer-Alfred Ploetz-Henry Friedlander Institute (ridding the World of Untermenschen, Useless Eaters, Dogs and Cats and other assorted Riff-Raff since 1933).

“OLIGARCHY. It’s the New Normal, So Better Get Used To It… or else. Onward to the MASTER RACE!”

PS. Counselor and tower guard positions are opening up at FEMA camps Buchenwald and Auschwitz for the Summer and Fall Seasons 2020. Gas masks will be supplied at no extra charge.

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Objective

Apr 24, 2020 6:43 PM

Why do you keep blaming “capitalism” ?

There is no such thing! So it can’t be the problem.

Neo-liberalism (corporate globalization), is collectivism, socialism, or communism under a different banner. Call it what you like, what its not is freedom. It maybe crony-capitalism but it doesn’t meet the true definition of capitalism, if such a thing ever existed.

Coming from a council estate, for 3/4 of my life I was a committed socialist, my personal background dictated it was my only hope for a better future (if you aspire for materialistic possession). Then 20 or so years ago my beliefs began to change, Just after Blair was elected. Now I see the value of self reliance & breaking away from the government teat. Not because my own circumstances have changed (i’m as poor today as i’ve ever been, i consider myself a great success in accruing no wealth or property ownership at all) but because I realize the restrictive nature of collectivism & harm from materialism.

There is nothing more destructive than the collective system narrative, socialism only breeds inequality, unfairness & poverty for the simple fact it goes against the laws of nature, encouraging dependence on others. Neo-liberalism is socialism with the same principles of all other “democratic” political ideologies. A system of centralized governance lead by a self appointed elite minority who dictate the conduct of others for their gain at the expense of the majority who don’t have the courage to take responsibility for their own lives.

I believe in the value of ones own unregulated labor but not the ownership of property! That’s where this all starts, obsession with property & accumulating wealth, neo-liberals are anti-nature seeking constant self improvement, which has only ever created more problems than it solved.

Though I am not religious in any sense, so don’t necessarily agree with the “gift to mankind” nuance, i do subscribe to exactly that principle, why shouldn’t anyone be able to say that piece of land isn’t being occupied, i can build my earth bag home there & look after my family grow consume & barter my own produce & skills, fix my own tools & machines etc.

Freedom doesn’t mean no rules, you would need ecological protections & basic respect for one another (ie don’t kill or commit violence upon each other or take other peoples personal resources) those very principles of common law, socialists abandon the second they get elected.

Sadly i don’t hold much hope for Kevin Cahills beliefs or the “freeman” movement (contract v common law), they are great principles to aspire to but irrelevant because the system is built to oppress freedom.

You have just described American settlers down to a tee, apart from the religious ethic. If we found a new America and we pacified the natives, we could all build log cabins but we’d still have to barter… that’s collectivism. If we lived in a post-apocaliptical world we’d have to band together to protect ourselves from marauders… collectivism. Anyway, my point is look how America turned out, collectivism could have saved them from themselves.

Funny how you can see so many Merkins working to support others, yet the political elite are the most viciously Evil collection of xenophobic, pathologically greedy, Life-hating, misanthropes that have ever existed.

I don’t know much about Kevin Cahill’s beliefs but his books are good. You can get “Who Owns Britain” at the library… well you used to be able to…
I agree that standing up against the state is kind of what they want. I hope to just ignore them into irrelevance. Provide our own food, fix our own stuff, make our own entertainment, government is just an expensive layer of management. Perhaps people can take this time to see how little we actually need them.
But I always was a dreamer.

Ha. You’re an ageing libertarian anarchist. Have you a wife and kids? I agree with you on self reliance and innovation should be admired. However, collectivism doesn’t have to mean globalism. Communities work together all across the world, they always will because teams are a necessity. Neoliberalism is nothing like Socialism, I’m in appalled you should claim that, it shows how ideological you are.

I’m no such thing, i’ll thank you for not telling me what I am, from reading a couple of paragraphs quickly posted on a public forum. I’ve known me all my life, so i think i’m a qualified expert on me.

collectivism doesn’t have to mean globalism

Socialism doesn’t have to mean taking away everyone’s freedom to protect the terminally sick & terminally old, but egotistical socialist politicians always end up crossing the line. Capitalism doesn’t have to mean privatizing profit & socializing loss but it inventively always does. Lots of things don’t have to mean anything, but when you put psychopaths in charge it wont end well.

When you put your destiny in some one elses hands you always end up disappointed. My ideology is freedom & truth, That’s all.

This site froze up keeps wanting to check my browser for something, you know socialist surveillance.

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breweriana

Apr 24, 2020 5:56 PM

Much of the debate and ‘safety assessments’ centre on the glyphosate, bad enough on it’s own, whilst totally disregarding the additives that go into it to make the actual weedkiller that is sold.

Rather like when certain drugs are taken together, the weedkiller ‘cocktail’ is causing a leveraging effect, that has not yet been proven to be safe, at all. In fact, it would seem it is many, many times more dangerous to ALL forms of life, not just weeds.

The additives are known as ‘adjuvants’ and make Roundup deadlier that straight glyphosate. Just like the adjuvants in vaccines, many secret because proprietary. What’s more important-property or Life?

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nondimenticare

Apr 24, 2020 5:19 PM

Though this article fuels my already strong and obsessive antipathy to the toxic – in every way – Bill Gates, I have to remember that is not Gates per se but the very meaning of oligopoly that is shown up in his foundation’s every deed. Money buys not only a good name (immunity from prosecution) but the narrative of the entire society, culminating in its death knell. There is no money given without strings – except, perhaps, by loving grandparents. If only he could come up with a vaccine and inoculate himself against virulent sociopathy.

Extract from Chapter Three “Structural Bigotry – The Economics of Oppression” from the book “The New Human Rights Movement – Re-inventing the Economy to End Oppression” by Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement. This passage exposes the myth of “philanthropism bestowed by capitalism” and is a direct transcript of pages 108-109

Joseph writes:

“While all charity is admirable, once it becomes institutionalised and funded to the extent seen by organisations such as the Gates Foundation, it turns into something different, with extended social ramifications. These elite charities are true , large scale institutions with power , engaging in lobbying, transnational partnerships, political policy alignments and so on. Where and how the George Soroses and Bill Gateses of the world mobilise money can have powerful effects on industry, politics, culture, academia, scientific research, national policy and the like. In the case of Gates, his foundation is “undeniably, the most powerful and influential global health charity in history” in the words of health-law professor Lawrence Gostin. What critics rightfully point out is that, regardless of good intentions, unaccountable, singular private power in global health affairs poses serious problems, in the same way autocratic dictatorships pose serious problems for democracy and liberty. Any organisation with the power to actually affect the lives of millions of people needs transparency, accountability, and a democratic presence. These private institutions have little to none.

So what we have is the rise of a new breed of pseudo-egalitarian capitalists. They generate their wealth by way of often ruthless competitive behaviour in the private sector, arguably promoting the very mechanisms that have led to the vast structural violence and extensive poverty existing on Earth to begin with. They then turn around and offer their charity as the solution to the problems created by the very system that rewards them. Once again, this has nothing to do with intent. It is about an underlying hypocrisy that bypasses and obscures the real problem-solving focus desperately needed to further human-rights justice. That focus cannily be structural.

At the same time, this institutionalisation of philanthropy also serves to placate the public, giving a caring face to those who have often extracted such great wealth at the cost of others’ well being. In the words of activist Slavoj Zizek, “Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation” . As shown before with the research regarding how people tend to change as they gain more wealth and advantage, there is a deep psychological need of those of great wealth to feel that their exceptionalism is justified. They naturally wish not only to ensure everyone believes they deserve what they have , but also to justify it to themselves. An example of this is the “Giving Pledge” wherein a group of more than 130 people, mostly billionaires, have promised to give half or more of their wealth to charity before or after their death. This now globally recognised project has been met with great humanitarian accolades in the media, especially given its timely creation as public outcry against inequality grows. Yet it’s very difficult not to view the entire project as a public relations stunt for the upper 0.1 per cent. As the organisation states: “ The pledge is a moral committment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organisations” In other words, it is first and foremost a gesture and non one signing there prestigious pledge has any obligation to do anything. There is no transparency, so the public might never know whether a person gave or not.

For those who do follow through, there are prominent tax incentives, specifically in the United States. Since donations to charity and philanthropic foundations allow for reduced tax liability for the rich, giving money away often becomes an act of strategic self-interest. Very often, the rich simply set up their own foundations and move money through them via tax loopholes. For example the infamous Walton family, of the Walmart empire, five people with a combined net wealth of over $139 billion as of 2014, more than what the bottom 40 per cent of Americans have combined, do some fantastic tax gymnastics through their foundation. An independent audit of the Walton Family Foundation found that not only did only .04 per cent of its wealth make it to charity in its generation’s lifetime, but it also stated, “The Walmart heirs have built one of the largest and most powerful private foundations in the country -at almost no cost to themselves. In addition the Waltons are exploiting complex loopholes in the tax code in order to avoid billions of dollars in estate taxes by funding their Foundation with special trusts.”

This looks like a good reference work with some interesting ideas Cupid, I’ll check it out.

Financial and legal legerdemain is their stock in trade, using laws drafted for them by corrupted politicians.

The product profits + externalities (problems), then problem solution profits + more externalities (more problems), … ad infinitum is a consequence of their infinite growth model. Total insanity on a finite planet.

The externalities are deliberately excluded by financial and corporate law therefore the commons are freely exploited for corporate interest without recompense for the common good.

The misanthropic pseudo-philanthropy as identified by Peter Joseph and discussed above is a public relations veneer, in the same vein as the hydrocarbons industry and their greenwash PR.

An interesting insight into the narcissistic psychopathology of these people too. Deep down they know their self-love is unjustified, and then crave approval from their victims. It concurs with my own experience of dealing with this personality type, they truly are insane.

Your welcome Cupid, there are a lot more people who know these things than you think, unfortunately they are too afraid to speak up. It’s not their fault really, it’s their social conditioning. I’m too old and awkward to keep silent now.

You may think you are old, Nemo, but I believe it is true to say that those who haven’t got the courage to speak out against injustice – regardless of their age – are as good as dead already

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tonyopmoc

Apr 24, 2020 5:14 PM

When I got a new job in 1995, and made responsible for my bit of it, whilst the servers were UNIX based, the front end was based on Windows NT. I struggled with Windows NT for a few weeks, but it was completely and utterley useless, for the job that needed to be done, so I simply binned it, and whilst I also had little experience of UNIX at the time, I learnt UNIX shell scripting, and a bit of Oracle,and hacked it very quick and dirty, and it worked fine.

When my son, was starting up his games thing (he was already a Microsoft Official Developer at the age of 12), he got an enormous amount of interest, from other kids the same age across the world, who wanted to play games. They sent him almost enough money to buy the bits for a server, to put in a data centre to enable very fast connectivity. He built it on Windows NT. I did say, you don’t want to do that. However it did work for about 7 days, and then got blasted to hell. So tail between his legs, he brought his server back home, and put Linux on it. He only asked me one question “Dad how do you configure the security”. So I drove him back to the data centre. He plugged it into the rack,and he came home. He got well over 1 million hits in one year, and it was as solid as a rock. He was 13 years old then. He is still running his own business now, almost all on Linux, but still uses Windows and various other operating systems, depending on what his customers want.

I still use Windows too, mainly because most applications are designed to run on Windows, and I also want to know about the kind of problems other people get.

As regards the current situation, well the first thing I did, was buy lots of seeds to grow food in my back garden and a rotovator, to dig up some of the lawn. The rotovator is actually quite scary, but incredibly impressive. I reckon more than 20 times faster than using a spade ( a bit like the difference between Linux and Windows)

Meanwhile, the best advice I can find is how to grow potatoes. Two little seed potatoes, once chitted, and planted in the ground – or even a bin, can grow 36 big Baking Potatoes in only a few months. Just don’t let the actual potatoes underground see the sun, and don’t eat the leaves. You can of course start with more than 2, and if you don’t pull them all up to eat, if you get lucky, they will continue to reproduce, making even more potatoes.

Welcome to the very satisfying world of agriculture on a small scale. I’ve been gardening for a good part of my life and loved every minute of it, back-breaking though it can be, at times. Potatoes are the easiest and a good way to supple up your garden. Just don’t plant them in the same spot too often. Have fun.

Interesting that you mention owls. Until last year (long story) we had a place in Burgundy with 3000 sq metres of land. Two vegetable gardens, fruit and nut trees, a barn housing a couple of owls, a decent sized flock of bats, and neighboring cats all of whom did a pretty decent job of pest control. Even a couple of small porcupines.

Good.
Also worth it, if you have room, are Rhubarb, Gooseberry, Blackcurrant and Strawberries (these send out new plants so fast it’s hard to keep up). Once planted, they all grow forever (mine are well over 20 years old).

If you don’t like Rhubarb Crumble, then make wine – this goes for all the fruits above, too.
Strawberry Jam and wine are a delight.

Surplus plants sell easily at fetes and car boot sales, etc.

The only thing I would take issue with is the Rotovator.
About 30 years ago I hired one for the garden. Worked great – it churned all the pernicious weeds into the ground, but then it took me the rest of the season to dig them out by hand with the spade.

My wife does the fruit. She gets clouds of it. I love rhubarb. It used to grow fine, where we used to live, and I did try to grow it last year, but had no success. Probably down to the ph in the soil. The spuds should be fine. They were last year, but on a much smaller scale. She is handling this really well, and is very enthusiastic. Most of our friends, particularly the ones who live alone and do not have gardens, are not doing too well, and we are really worried about them. Some of them seem to be on the brink, so all we can do, is empathise with them, as if they are having a nervous breakdown, and say it will be O.K.

It is that, which I find completely scary.

Without my lovely wife, I would probably crack up too, but in the morning when she is singing to her dance class, she just cracks me up. When she is singing, I know she is happy, and that is good enough for me.